CBS Sells Out “Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Rogers”

CBS Sold Out – It appears that corporate America knows a good promotional opportunity when they see one as they were quick to jump on the “Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Rogers” bandwagon. CBS has announced they have sold out all available advertising space for this Saturday’s highly anticipated broadcast.

“I’d say this was probably a quicker sellout than the EliteXC shows,” Kelly Kahl, CBS’ executive vice president for primetime programming, told Sherdog.com.

Aside from monitoring tickets sales, advertising demand is another way that networks can gauge interest in its programming. Kahl said that, while other CBS sporting events complete their advertising sales a day or two before game time, this MMA broadcast has been booked for quite some time.

In regards to mixed martial arts commercials, MMA fans can look forward to EA Sports unveiling a promo of their highly anticipated “EA Sports’ MMA” video game, which is scheduled to release in 2010.

Although Kahl would not commit on the Neilson rating number CBS is eying, no pun intended, she did mention that they were focused on capturing a larger share of the highly coveted Male 18-49 and 18-34 demographic.

CBS normally averages a measly .7 rating in that demo on Saturday nights, the network’s lowest period on any given week.

The last time CBS dabbled in the MMA arena was back in October 2008 at “EliteXC: Heat.” That was the evening that street fighting legend Kevin “Kimbo” Slice was slapped senseless by Seth Petruzelli, however CBS still came up big scoring a 2.5 rating in the Male 18-34 and 18-49 sectors.

The three live MMA events that CBS broadcast for EliteXC in 2008 averaged between 2.6 and 4.8 million viewers.